How Many Words Do You Need to Know to Speak a Language Fluently?

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How to Achieve Language Fluency (Plus 5 Myths Dispelled)

A B O U T T H I S V I D E O
In this video, I will share with you how I learn new words in order to reach spoken fluency in my target language.

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F O L L O W M E

[chuchelka]

Fluency is not only a number of words - it's the ability to combine those words smoothly when speaking, using the right language rhythm and intonation.

[NaturalLanguageLearning]

Nothing beats input when it comes to acquiring new vocabulary. Reading and listening a lot is the way.

[vatnikxxi]

I think the problem with fluency is primarily psychological. Small children don't ever hesitate to use the words they learn from their children. Unlike adults they are not afraid of using limited amount of words or phrases the 'wrong' way. So acquiring fluency in foreign language can be even more favorable with relatively poor vocabulary.

[madanana]

10000 words of Oxford dictionary ( Oxford dictionary which has 35000 words 700 pages 2 column each column has about 20 words ) or Longman dictionary ( same size of Oxford dictionary) is enough to be fluent 3000 for daily communications with people in the street and 7000 to study in college and university and read books and listen to news on tv … fluent means to watch tv or listen to radio 1 day 24 hours and understand every sentence and everything happened on tv or radio.. and repeat what you watched or listened easily with your own sentences without any mistakes or bad accent

[GingerAutie]

atm I use Italian every day in real life situations, since I went to pastry school in Italy and am making an internship here… at the beginning when I came to Italy in February it was quite hard for me and I struggled a lot, but now I feel quite confident in most situations I’m confronted with. I’m also studying a bit of Italian every day. I’ll go home again on December. My Italian teacher wants to prepare me for the C1 exam in Italian next spring after studying with me a bit after I return from Italy. I have to start reading more in Italian though, I struggle with that to find the motivation for. ^^

So I had to be able to communicate my needs with a basic vocabulary when I arrived in Italy in February out of pure necessity.

[CouchPolyglot]

I never focus on the number of words, but rather try to have fun while listening to the language, speaking or reading in it. Vocabulary comes naturally by doing those things, you need at least an A1+ level or knowledge of similar languages to do that though... :)

[matheusfelipe]

Brow, the more I learn, the more it seems to have words I don't know . As mairo Vergara says, we don't have to put the goal of fluency, but just improve yourself everyday and be better than yesterday . I don't even care about knowing everything, but studying everyday and learn everyday a little bit .

[fseenamber]

I have no words to thank you for mentoring us.
May you Rise and Shine always.

[islombekabdullaev]

Luca, thank you enormously for your practical information. As I understood, there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to the number of words for fluency as the more active vocabulary you have the better you are a producer of that particular language. It's also related to a particular interest as you examplified with space related lexicon. I would even break down fluency into specific areas as you might not find necessary words to communicate to a mechanic or a doctor or a funeral organiser in your native language. So, i suppose, we should not be too much concentrated on the number of vocab, instead how well we can articulate our thoughts, ideas and opinions is more important.

[justinwr]

Actually, the correct number is 11, 756.8. That's how many words you need to be fluent.

[dannylojkovic]

A good example of someone proficient in multiple languages (10) is Timothy Snyder. He’s a historian of Eastern European history, especially with regards to the Holocaust. He can speak, read, write, and listen in five of those languages proficiently, but can only read proficiently in the other 5 (which ones exactly I do not know). Still extremely impressive regardless, but to put it simply, he may need to know how to read Belarusian but he doesn’t need to know how to speak it for his job. Perhaps he’s never tried interacting with locals in these locations and only focused on doing his research and then going home to put his research into his own writing. It all really depends on your goals is what I’m trying to get at.

[aiorosgalaviz]

I really love watching your videos, they inspire me a lot to keep on learning my target languages, good job!

[raularcos]

Saludos Luca.
Muy buenos todos las recomendaciones que nos das, bendiciones y muchas gracias.

[solea]

Since our holiday in Rome two years ago ( and falling in love with the language ) I have been stuffing my brain with words and snippet phrases. Only now do I feel ready to start making conversation with confidence. Words are the bricks, you cannot build the house unless the bricks turn up. Pronunciation practice is the foundations of the house. I think the cement that binds the bricks is the grammar. That's how it works for me.

[alobo_]

Exacto, no se trata de conocer muchas palabras sino saber cuando usarlas para comunicarse de la mejor manera... Happy weekend!

[franciscopena]

For me, fluency is the ability to speak naturally without pauses in everyday conversation. It is not necessarily knowing thousands of words.

[bhami]

Sometimes an entire sentence is the context, and none of the individual words. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." (Noam Chomsky, contrasting syntax with semantics.)

[danieltemelkovski]

Re what it means to know a word, I don't claim to know (heh), but one thing it surely can't mean is being able to define the word. If that were the standard, then native speakers would barely "know" perhaps 1% of the words they think they know. "Knowing" a word isn't binary; there is a spectrum of familiarity. At one end, there would be the ability to define a word - if you can define a word, there can be no question that you know it, probably as well as it's humanly possible to know it. At the other would be something like words you've heard before and sort of think you know what they mean when you hear them used, but if you're honest with yourself you'd admit you're not quite sure. Eg in English, a word like "tergiversate." If you read a lot, chances are you will have come across it at some point, but unless you bothered to look up the definition and committed it to memory, you probably right now couldn't honestly say you know what it means or confidently use it yourself. On the other hand, it's not a word that is completely unknown to you either. So between these two extremes (the ability to define it and having heard it/seen it before) are words that we "know" with varying degrees of confidence and competence.

[runfire]

I love learning Polish because even simple words like “dog” have many different forms!

[freesoul]

Hi, I don't know if you ever answered this question: What do you think of spaced repetition systems? 😊 Greetings from Germany!